Archive for: July, 2006

If you have a wireless card with an open sourced driver (for example, Intel Wireless Pro series, found in many laptops manufactured during the past 3 years, and in many more laptops to come), you can take advantage of extra channels that are allowed to be used in countries other than the US and Canada.

The key is that if you go from North America to Europe, for example, you will notice that there people can use 13 instead of 11 channels for B and G wireless communications. In Japan you can use 14. But your driver will not be aware of your physical location, even though the ability to work with those channels is there.

So you would need to manually edit the driver to include those extra frequencies into your “Geography”. Look for what they might call “Custom Geography”, to keep the actuall regional frequency tables intact. Knowledge of the programming language used to write the driver will be helpful, but in the absense of that, common sense should be enough. Look for keywords like geo,channels. The frequencies will be listed in tables with entries like: {2412, 1}, {2417, 2}, {2422, 3} — this is just the first 3 channels of BG range. Similar things exist for A range. Recompile the driver and load it. You should see something similar to the message below in dmesg output:

Detected geography ZZM (14 802.11bg channels)

Warning!

The use of any wireless channels is subject to regulations of the local governments, do not use these extra ones in North America! EyesOpen.org cannot be held responsible for any illegal use of this article in countries where this is not permitted.